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Comment by strbean | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of hard to come up with new futurological themes and anxieties when the foundational works were so prescient :)

What would be the new ones? Universal surveillance? Pretty sure that was covered. Ubiquitous AI becoming malevolent or just generally shifty? Done to death.

Did Altered Carbon have anything new with technological advancements leading to immortality? I'm sure that was done at some point... and the book came out almost 20 years ago.

The latest season of Westworld was fun, but most of the cyberpunk elements are recycled, with a veneer of solarpunk. Fancy techno-drugs have certainly been done before.

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Did Altered Carbon have anything new with technological advancements leading to immortality?

When I read the books I was struck by Quellcrist Falconer's approach to guerilla warfare. She thought that immortality allowed guerillas to use time as cover, the way guerillas of past ages had concealed themselves in urban crowds or the remote countryside. It was the first time I had encountered that idea. (Someone who's read even more SF than me may cite earlier antecedents.)

The TV adaptation replaced this interesting character and her ideas with the well-worn Noble Reactionary telling us that Technology Is Bad.

I want an epistolary murder mystery that takes the form of a thread on a popular website that includes the killer dropping hints and evidence of his crime. When it comes out half the fun will be figuring out which anonymous posts belong to the same person and letting the readers solve the mystery of figuring out which one of the trolls was also the killer.

If you're into anime, Psycho Pass had a few episode subplot that pretty much was that, minus the in letter format.

And didn't Ghost in the Shell show have plot lines like that, such as the Laughing Man?

Kind of but without spoiling anything that was mostly conjecture by the general populace. A lot of the scenes where Motoko is on the VR-esque message boards are other people speculating on the Laughing Man's motives.

Edit: Though on quick second thought I think there is at least one instance where he does contact her in that space.

Found the killer.

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